I live 15 miles west of this lad, I happened to have seen this outside my 'backyard'. I am currently reading up on some interesting course work, and part of this involves using a planisphere, I happened to go outside to check the skyline for clarity late evening, and woosh! (well actually it was silent) it crossed the sky, quite slow actually, but a great sight nevertheless.

My line of sight was the reverse of the picture taken by the lad,if one flips the picture left to right, what I seen was form the other side, and although I watched for about four seconds( a long time for meteors/) I did not see the full effect shown in the lads photo.

Originally posted by marcus Yes and please explain some of the terms in simple language
(so listeners besides selfAdjoint get the gist)
Are you going to be able to take photographs of the whole sky?
What is this about?

Your story about seeing the meteor gives the news item
realer, thanks for the amplification.

Although I have just started Two Open University short course's(UK) one being Introducing Astronomy,a precursor to my full course starting in Feb 04, which involves the use of the said Planisphere.

It appears to be a great tool for the a new learner, it give a great perspective of where one is in relation to the dynamics of the cosmos, the Planisphere provided by the University seems quite complicated as it details quite a lot, but its a great hands on tool, every home should have one!

When I posted my response, it was before I had seen the local and bbc news-shot, it then turned out that I could calculate that what I had seen was a little later than the image taken by the Lad. As I stated in my post, I had not seen the 'explosive' image, but I had surely seen a genuine meteor/ite!

The local report had given a precise time the Lad took his photo, and I knew what I seen was much later, In hindsight I should have realized the image in the photo was around Dusk, what I seen was quite later. Great to have the image taken by the lad cleared up though